"The ... plays in the Shakespeare Vacummed series average just under 70% of their original word counts. As in most film and stage productions, archaic words, repetition, excessive description and incomprehensible wordplay are vacumed from the scripts. Shakespeare wrote for his actors. These texts are intended to help the modern reader lift the words off the page and onto the stage." -- inside cover.

Cover title. Word count of this version, 13,147. Original word count, 18,156.